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14422Talk of an RSA Boycott Grows After Reports It Colluded With the NSAhttp://allthingsd.com/20131223/talk-of-an-rsa-boycott-grows-after-reports-it-colluded-with-the-nsa/
http://allthingsd.com/20131223/talk-of-an-rsa-boycott-grows-after-reports-it-colluded-with-the-nsa/#commentsTue, 24 Dec 2013 01:03:37 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=380786A boycott may be brewing against security company RSA’s annual conference, in the wake of reports that the company used encryption technology that had been created by the U.S. National Security Agency in its products in order to create a “back door” in them.

A well-known security researcher has announced that he is boycotting RSA’s annual security industry conference in San Francisco early next year, and will no longer deliver a scheduled talk at that event.

In an open letter addressed to Joe Tucci, the CEO of EMC, of which RSA is a unit, and Art Coviello, the head of RSA, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said he is “withdrawing his support for the event.” (See the full text of the letter below.)

In a story on Friday, Reuters reported that RSA had accepted a $10 million payment from the NSA to use a random-number generator created by that agency in a widely used security product called BSafe.

After being developed by NSA, the technology, known as Dual EC DRBG, which stands for Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, was recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Time (NIST) as an algorithm to create random numbers, a key part of the process of encrypting and securing data communications.

RSA has issued a carefully worded denial of what Reuters described as a “secret contract” with the NSA. The company said that it has long worked with the NSA openly for what it described as an “effort to strengthen, not weaken” security products.

RSA’s annual conference, scheduled Feb. 24-28, 2014, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, is a significant event for large and small companies in the computer security industry, and is also widely attended by independent researchers. The conference boasts attendance of about 15,000 people.

I’ve been working with computer security since 1991. Nowadays I do quite a bit of public speaking on the topic. In fact, I have spoken eight times at either RSA Conference USA, RSA Conference Europe or RSA Conference Japan. You’ve even featured my picture on the walls of your conference walls among the ‘industry experts’.

On December 20th, Reuters broke a story alleging that your company accepted a random number generator from the National Security Agency, and set it as the default option in one of the your products, in exchange of $10 million. Your company has issued a statement on the topic, but you have not denied this particular claim. Eventually, NSA’s random number generator was found to be flawed on purpose, in effect creating a back door. You had kept on using the generator for years despite widespread speculation that NSA had backdoored it.

As my reaction to this, I’m cancelling my talk at the RSA Conference USA 2014 in San Francisco in February 2014.

Aptly enough, the talk I won’t be delivering at RSA 2014 was titled “Governments as Malware Authors”.

I don’t really expect your multibillion dollar company or your multimillion dollar conference to suffer as a result of your deals with the NSA. In fact, I’m not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway — why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans. Surveillance operations from the US intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners. However I’m a foreigner. And I’m withdrawing my support from your event.

Sincerely,

Mikko Hypponen
Chief Research Officer
F-Secure

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131223/talk-of-an-rsa-boycott-grows-after-reports-it-colluded-with-the-nsa/feed/0Indie Platformer Badland Finally Comes to Android, but With a New Business Modelhttp://allthingsd.com/20131129/indie-platformer-badland-finally-comes-to-android-but-with-a-new-business-model/
http://allthingsd.com/20131129/indie-platformer-badland-finally-comes-to-android-but-with-a-new-business-model/#commentsFri, 29 Nov 2013 21:20:18 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=375710Badland, a much-honored platformer game developed by Finnish indie studio Frogmind, is now on Android. But wait, what’s this? It’s free.

The addicting and arty game launched on iOS in March for $4, and last month came to BlackBerry World at the same price. But, after talking with other mobile developers, Frogmind decided to go free-to-play for the game’s Android release, adding 15-second interstitial ads and two in-app purchases: One just removes the ads, while the other removes the ads and unlocks the second half of the game, for a total of 80 levels.

In an interview earlier this month, Frogmind COO Teemu Maki-Patola said selling Badland for $4 has worked on the App Store, but that premium downloads don’t work on Google Play. The developers Frogmind consulted while preparing for the release had changed their Android titles from paid to free downloads, and in some cases saw as much as a 100x increase in downloads.

(Of course, if money is the issue, free also works “better” on iOS. Only one game in the App Store’s Top 25, Minecraft Pocket Edition, is a paid download.)

Also influencing the paid-to-free experiment, according to Maki-Patola: The anniversary promotion for the App Store earlier this year, during which Apple gave away five popular paid games, Badland among them, for free. In the game’s first four months, it tallied 280,000 paid downloads, but when it temporarily turned free, it added 7.12 million more in a week.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131129/indie-platformer-badland-finally-comes-to-android-but-with-a-new-business-model/feed/0Nokia Shareholders to Approve Microsoft Dealhttp://allthingsd.com/20131119/nokia-shareholders-approve-microsoft-deal/
http://allthingsd.com/20131119/nokia-shareholders-approve-microsoft-deal/#commentsTue, 19 Nov 2013 14:30:45 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=373586Nokia’s shareholders have done what everyone expected them to do, approving the sale of the Finnish company’s devices and services business to Microsoft.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131119/nokia-shareholders-approve-microsoft-deal/feed/0IndoorAtlas Aims to Use Magnetic Fields to Map the Insides of Buildingshttp://allthingsd.com/20131016/indooratlas-aims-to-use-magnetic-fields-to-map-the-insides-of-buildings/
http://allthingsd.com/20131016/indooratlas-aims-to-use-magnetic-fields-to-map-the-insides-of-buildings/#commentsWed, 16 Oct 2013 14:49:08 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=365995Several years ago, I had a peculiar fascination with location technology. I tried out every GPS gadget that came along, examined how the precision on one would differ from another. Eventually, as navigation moved from dedicated devices to smartphones, the fascination wore off. A little help from the Google Maps app on my iPhone keeps me from getting lost pretty much anywhere I go, by car or on foot.

But it doesn’t work so well indoors. Signals from GPS satellites don’t easily penetrate inside buildings — the signals are about as strong as a dim light bulb — and help from Wi-Fi will only get you so far. Now there are numerous outfits that are aiming to fix that.

Earlier this year, Apple acquired a startup called WiFiSlam that does exactly that. Another company I once encountered, Rosum, sought to use TV signals for indoor positioning but, after a decade, ended up being bought out by TruePosition, another location-tech company that is a unit of Liberty Media and was one of its investors.

This week, I had a chat with Janne Haverinen, the CEO of IndoorAtlas, a startup that has spun out of Finland’s University of Oulu. Its approach is to use the unique magnetic properties that exist within every building to create a sort of fingerprint. It does this using the compass chip that’s inside every smartphone.

These chips and the apps associated with them aren’t used all that much, at least actively. When was the last time you launched the Compass app on your iPhone? And yet they’re present in every iPhone and Android phone. They usually show up in the teardowns conducted by firms like IHS. (Recent examples of an Android phone here and the newest iPhones here.)

Using these magnetic fields — which are caused, in part, by all the steel framing used in modern building techniques — to determine a position can give you a precision of about three meters, or 10 feet. That’s close enough to get you into the correct room for a meeting, navigate you to within sight of an airport gate, or get you in front of the painting or sculpture you want to see in a museum. And there’s no need for any new infrastructure. No new Wi-Fi hotspots, no more anything. The infrastructure is already there, naturally.

It turns out that the next generation of compass chips is getting even more sensitive to these magnetic variations, which will only increase the precision. “The current ones aren’t as sensitive as we would like, but the new ones are getting better,” Haverinen told me.

There was a time when GPS technology wasn’t very accurate, either. In mid-2000, President Clinton ordered an end to the intentional degradation of GPS signals for civilians, a policy known as Selective Availability. Once that was gone, an industry sprang up around navigation technology, because it was then possible to build software that could give you turn-by-turn instructions. Better magnetic sensitivity will enable indoor precision to 10 feet or better, Haverinen told me.

The plan for IndoorAtlas, which recently opened an office in Sunnyvale, Calif., is to give developers a set of tools to build apps that harness indoor-navigation capabilities. Imagine one for your favorite museum, or for a trade show, a mall or tourist attraction.

Of course, the real action is with retailers. As long as I’ve been hearing about location-based services on mobile devices, this has been a perceived treasure trove. Steer a consumer to the precise location of the product they need when they need it, the thinking goes, and you significantly boost the chance they’re going to buy. You can also figure out ways to advertise to consumers when they’re in a particular location. Sure, it may sound a little “Minority Report,” but one hopes that it would be more useful than intrusive.

There’s some work involved. Developers working on a particular building need to build a floor-plan file, and then collect data to go with it. In a typical retail environment, that will mean walking up and down the aisles with the phone. (See a video demonstration here.) In time, Haverinen said, he hopes to build up a significant database of floor plans of major buildings via the crowdsourced efforts of developers.

IndoorAtlas is an early-stage company, and between a grant from the Finnish government and investments from angels, plus a seed round of 500,000 euro (about $675,000) from Dallas-based Mobility Ventures, the company is said to have raised about $1 million.

The short video below gives you a pretty good idea of what the company has in mind, as well as the possibilities of what might be done when navigation technology companies intensify their attention on the indoors:

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131016/indooratlas-aims-to-use-magnetic-fields-to-map-the-insides-of-buildings/feed/0Angry Birds Maker Loses Another Top Executivehttp://allthingsd.com/20130927/angry-birds-maker-loses-another-top-executive/
http://allthingsd.com/20130927/angry-birds-maker-loses-another-top-executive/#commentsFri, 27 Sep 2013 17:48:51 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=361534Rovio Entertainment Ltd., the maker of the wildly popular Angry Birds mobile game franchise, has lost another top-level executive to the burgeoning Helsinki, Finland, mobile gaming startup scene.

Teemu Huuhtanen, previously Rovio’s vice president for mergers and acquisitions, left the company in the beginning of August to co-found a new mobile gaming studio, Next Games.

Microsoft’s massive $7.2 billion deal to acquire Nokia’s handset and services business has been rumored ever since the Finnish company’s CEO, Stephen Elop, agreed to standardize Nokia’s smartphones on Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. And it’s one that Elop touted as almost inevitable in a press conference Tuesday morning.

“We have some of the best products in the industry, but we need more combined muscle to truly break through with consumers,” Elop said. “I share the frustration that comes from being so far behind two very large competitors. … With this transaction we can accelerate our current movement and gain a stronger financial backing to be more successful in the mobile market.”

But earlier this summer, Elop was spinning a very different story, one in which Nokia would hold on to its struggling handset business and make it successful. Indeed, this past July, he told The Wall Street Journal that it was “hard to understand the rationale” for selling Nokia’s devices business.

“That possibility to be successful is there,” he said. “If we keep executing well and keep delivering, then our future can be quite bright.”

So what happened between mid-July and September? Did Elop experience a sudden moment of clarity that made it easier to understand the rationale for selling Nokia’s devices business? Or were his public comments simply misdirection intended to paint a happy face on Nokia’s dim prospects even as the company’s leadership met in secret with Microsoft about the deal that would be announced last night?

Or did the trend lines for Nokia’s latest and best efforts simply point to an inescapable end point, a journey that demanded a detour from inevitable decline?

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130903/elop-in-july-its-hard-to-understand-the-rationale-for-selling-nokias-devices-business/feed/0Microsoft Is Getting Nokia's Phone Business for a Songhttp://allthingsd.com/20130903/microsoft-is-getting-nokias-phone-business-for-a-song/
http://allthingsd.com/20130903/microsoft-is-getting-nokias-phone-business-for-a-song/#commentsTue, 03 Sep 2013 15:39:10 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=355409Say what you will about the overall strategic wisdom of Microsoft paying $7 billion and change for Nokia’s smartphone business and patent portfolio, but you certainly can’t fault Microsoft for choosing to buy now versus a few years ago.

Shares of Nokia peaked in late 2007 at $40.59, when its wireless phone division still ruled the world and its share of the world’s market for smartphones, then based primarily on its since-abandoned Symbian operating system. Since then, it has all been downhill. The shares never traded higher than that price; they’ve fallen by more than 90 percent. Prior to the announcement of today’s news, American Depository Receipts of Nokia closed at $3.90. And while Microsoft is not getting the whole company, it’s certainly paying a lot less for the piece it’s getting than it would have.

As a way of placing the height of its share price in historical context, here’s a brief reminder of what the wireless industry looked like in late 2007: Apple’s first-generation iPhone was still new on the market, and the first phone running Google’s Android was nearly a year from release. BlackBerry still dominated a fair portion of the smartphone business, and its fortunes were still on the rise. Even Palm was still a market player, if a distant one, and was still a year away from pivoting toward webOS. (You remember how that turned out.)

Anyway, here’s another look at the near-total collapse in Nokia’s share price over the course of five years and change, via Google Finance:

Well, it only cost $7.17 billion, but Microsoft now has a pretty obvious candidate to lead the company as soon as CEO Steve Ballmer vacates the seat he said he would leave within the year: Nokia CEO Stephen Elop.

But it seems clear that the acquisition puts the former president of Microsoft’s business division in the front of the line to take over the software giant, ahead of several internal candidates and a whole lot of external ones. In fact, Elop is both external and internal.

While Elop has critics who say he did not fix Nokia or much of anything else in his long career in tech, others are likely to point to a pedigree that would also make him the favorite here (and at British bookmaker Ladbrokes already). This will doubtlessly be much-debated over the next weeks and months, as the CEO process moves to its conclusion.

But, unless co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates decides to bust a move — and he will not — it looks like this race is Elop’s to lose at this moment. That could certainly change, as we learn more about Elop’s qualifications.

I met Elop almost five years ago and was struck by the fact that he was the only exec at the company at the time who would publicly talk about how the software giant had gotten the “open” religion and was becoming “the most interoperable company in the world.”

At the time, I wrote: “I am still not sure about Microsoft, but one thing’s for sure: Elop has turned out to be one of the most interoperable of tech execs.”

Along with his stint running that powerful franchise at Microsoft, he had been COO of Juniper Networks and CEO of Macromedia, which was acquired under his tenure by Adobe.

His jump to the Finland telecom giant was a big one, given how far Nokia’s star had fallen in the mobile market, with the fast growth of the Apple iPhone and the Google Android mobile operating system.

He’s had a roller-coaster ride since then, of course, including knitting himself to Microsoft in a major partnership, and trying to turn Nokia’s fortunes around. It has been rocky, to say the least, as he has yet to bring the company back to any kind of healthy health.

While he did not start the fire, of course, selling to Microsoft is perhaps the move of someone who knew that it was an unwinnable battle without bigger hoses of money, talent and more.

Did I mention that Elop also has five kids — including triplets?

But why don’t you listen to him instead?

Here’s a video interview I did with him in 2009, when he was at Microsoft:

And here is a cool video Elop ordered up — although it was dreamed up by others — while at Microsoft, as part of an “Envisioning” series, which sketched out a world of smartphones, touchscreens everywhere, and a whole lot of innovative interacting:

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130902/stephen-elop-is-now-microsoft-ceo-candidate-to-beat/feed/0Rovio's Next Big Game? Angry Birds Star Wars, Redux.http://allthingsd.com/20130715/rovios-next-big-game-angry-birds-star-wars-redux/
http://allthingsd.com/20130715/rovios-next-big-game-angry-birds-star-wars-redux/#commentsMon, 15 Jul 2013 15:30:34 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=342042Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish gaming outfit whose Angry Birds titles have been the runaway hit mobile games of the past four years, announced its latest game on Monday. Surprise, surprise: It’s another Angry Birds game.

It’s a sequel to Angry Birds Star Wars, to be precise, a crossover game based on the mega-popular sci-fi franchise and made in conjunction with Lucasfilm Ltd.; it debuted late last year. You could file the new game, dubbed Angry Birds Star Wars II, under the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” category — the first Angry Birds Star Wars game has raked in more than 100 million downloads to date.

As with any sequel, it’s hard to avoid some retreading. Yes, it’s another Angry Birds title, which means more bird-slinging and pig-killing. And with the Lucasfilm partnership in play, the game weaves characters and elements from the “Star Wars” universe into the story.

Pretty predictable stuff, especially from a company that has been criticized for leaning heavily on the strength of its Angry Birds series, perhaps unable to top the blockbuster franchise with another non-bird-based hit game.

To avoid too-much-rehash criticism, Rovio is partnering with toy maker Hasbro for a real-world licensing tie-in, incorporating physical toys into the app, as well. Users who buy Hasbro’s on-the-shelf piggies and birds can scan them with their smartphone and tablet cameras and be able to use those physical characters inside the app.

The sequel hits the App Store mid-September, while the space-age birdies are being touted heavily at San Diego Comic-Con all this week.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130715/rovios-next-big-game-angry-birds-star-wars-redux/feed/0Nokia Loss Narrowshttp://allthingsd.com/20130418/nokia-loss-narrows/
http://allthingsd.com/20130418/nokia-loss-narrows/#commentsThu, 18 Apr 2013 11:22:53 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=313439Nokia Corp. posted a narrower first quarter loss helped by continued cost cuts, rising sales of its new lineup of smartphones and an improvement at its network equipment business.

The Espoo, Finland-based company said its net loss in the quarter shrank to €272 million ($354.4 million) from €928 million a year earlier, beating analysts’ expectations for a loss of €434 million.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130418/nokia-loss-narrows/feed/0Top Angry Birds Exec Flies the Coophttp://allthingsd.com/20130221/top-angry-birds-exec-flies-the-coop/
http://allthingsd.com/20130221/top-angry-birds-exec-flies-the-coop/#commentsThu, 21 Feb 2013 16:00:50 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=296683Ville Heijari, who has spent the past three years leading brand marketing for Rovio, has traded in his Angry Birds sweatshirt for something of the more button-down variety.

Heijari, who had been a senior VP for Rovio, is remaining in Finland to lead European operations for PlayHaven, a San Francisco-based company that helps mobile games earn money through in-app ads for other games. The company offers game makers the opportunity to promote their titles on a pay-per-install basis, and is in about 4,000 iOS and Android games used by 115 million people each month.

“From my experience at Rovio, I see the importance in this industry of cross-promotion,” said Heijari, who left Rovio last week and started in the new role earlier this week. “PlayHaven is in exactly the right position.”

In January, PlayHaven hired former AdMob exec Charles Yim to be its chief operating officer. Heijari said he was introduced to PlayHaven by Yim, and has been watching the company closely over the last year.

Heijari, who said in an interview last year that he had yet to tire of Angry Birds, said Thursday that it was great helping build such a massive consumer brand, but he was attracted by PlayHaven’s business and culture.

The game shot to the top of the charts, but the real question is whether the game will help or hurt Rovio’s cause to prove itself more than a one-hit wonder.

Rovio has raised a ton of money and billed itself as a company looking to be the next Disney and build an entertainment franchise with animation, games and more. It already boasts an impressive collection of products from toys to candies, but all are hitched inexorably to the company’s signature birds.

There have even been squawks about Rovio potentially going public, but it is unclear whether investors would want to see more of a track record before plunking down for the shares.

Earlier this year, the company released Amazing Alex, its first non-Angry Birds title since the avians made their debut. It had a brief stint atop the charts but is now no longer in the top 100 U.S. titles, according to App Annie.

Bad Piggies is an Angry Birds spinoff, but unlike Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Seasons, it features an entirely new type of game play. Plus, in the new game, the pigs are the protagonists rather than the targets of weapons.

The pigs have to reach a map piece at each level and, instead of slingshots, the pigs travel by a conveyance put together each round by the player, using a set of available parts.

The result is a game that, if entertaining, also resembles a lot of other physics simulation titles on the market. The big question is whether the well-known characters will be enough to help it stand out.

http://allthingsd.com/20120930/will-bad-piggies-give-rovio-the-boost-it-needs/feed/0Rovio's Bad Piggies Shoots to the Top of the Charts, but Will It Stick?http://allthingsd.com/20120927/rovios-bad-piggies-shoots-to-the-top-of-the-charts-but-will-it-stick/
http://allthingsd.com/20120927/rovios-bad-piggies-shoots-to-the-top-of-the-charts-but-will-it-stick/#commentsThu, 27 Sep 2012 18:03:49 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=254912Rovio is back on top of the iPhone charts today with a game called Bad Piggies, a spinoff of its insanely popular Angry Birds franchise.

In the new game, released today on iOS, Android and Mac, players build elaborate vehicles for their pigs before sending them through elaborate obstacle courses. The goal is to collect as many eggs as possible.

The 99-cent app has already risen to the No. 1 spot on the iPhone and iPad paid charts in the U.S., according to AppData, which tracks user downloads. The game is not yet registering on Google Play. A company spokesperson did not immediately return emails seeking comment.

There’s a lot riding on Bad Piggies for the Finnish game maker Rovio, which attempted to move beyond its core Angry Birds franchise this summer with the release of a game called Amazing Alex. However, while the game initially zoomed to the top of the charts in 54 countries, it failed to stay there. After less than two months, Amazing Alex ranked as the 73rd most-popular paid app worldwide.

A hit on app stores would give the Finnish company a boost as it looks to a possible stock market flotation next year. Some analysts put its market value at between $6 billion and $9 billion, nearly on par with another top Finnish tech name, phone maker Nokia Oyj.

Rovio was founded in 2003, and became a global phenomenon after it launched Angry Birds for Apple’s iPhone in late 2009.

The highly-addictive game helped Rovio’s sales jump tenfold to $100 million last year, a fraction of the 38.7 billion euros ($50.2 billion) that Nokia chalked up.

What Rovio has proven with Amazing Alex — and now with Bad Piggies — is that it has the network power to get a game to No. 1 on the first day, a skill any mobile game developer would covet. But whether that alone is worth as much as $9 billion, it’s hard to know.

Will a return to its original hit franchise help justify its sky-high valuation?

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120927/rovios-bad-piggies-shoots-to-the-top-of-the-charts-but-will-it-stick/feed/0Eight Questions for Nokia CEO Stephen Elophttp://allthingsd.com/20120905/eight-questions-for-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop/
http://allthingsd.com/20120905/eight-questions-for-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop/#commentsWed, 05 Sep 2012 15:00:56 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=247698Saying that today is a big day for the Finnish wireless concern Nokia is putting it lightly. With its shares trading at levels not seen since the mid 1990s, and its once-dominant position atop the world market for wireless phones shattered, Nokia has placed a huge bet on a software partnership with Microsoft.

Today, the company announced two new phones, the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820, the latest in its line of smartphones running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Their key features: New cameras designed to eliminate blurriness and improve image quality in low light conditions; big, bright displays; and wireless charging. It is, in many ways, a reintroduction of the Nokia brand to North America, territory that has become more or less dominated by Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop sat down with AllThingsD for a few minutes today to talk about the new phones, and the company’s strategy going forward.

AllThingsD: So, Stephen, Nokia is releasing two new smartphones today. Let’s start there. What’s special about these phones?

Elop: Let me give you a little context. You may recall that back in February of 2011 we announced a pretty significant shift in Nokia’s strategy. And that included the partnership with Microsoft, it included a new focus on what we call mobile phones, which are the lower-priced devices and sold primarily in emerging markets, and also on what we call future disruptions, like what comes next, research and innovation. Then, in October of last year, we introduced the first Lumia phones, the first Windows Phone-based Nokia products. Today is the next big step in that journey with Microsoft. We’ve introduced the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 820.

The first thing I notice here are the displays. They’re pretty big and pretty bright.

Just to give you a sense of these devices, they have big, bright displays, but they also react uniquely under direct sunlight. So, through polarization and special brightening capabilities, you can stand out in direct sunlight and continue to use your device. Or if it’s winter, and you happen to be someplace cold, and you have gloves on, the screen responds to gloves, it responds to fingernails. It’s a very sensitive touch display. But the other feature that makes us confident about this phone is that we think it will enable people to take the best photos. I suspect from the device you have on your lap (an iPhone), you’ve probably taken a few thousand pictures in low light conditions, at night, where it’s a bit blurry, or the flash blasts out the face. Our PureView technology, which is a unique Nokia capability, in the Lumia 920, we’ve built a unique sensor and lens capability that is floating.

What do you mean by “floating”?

Mechanically, it moves. So to counterbalance the movement of your hand, or you’re walking down the street or in a car taking a picture, the lens is moving to counterbalance your movements. And we have unique software on the device that interprets it all to give you amazing images. In low light conditions, the hand-shaking is a big problem because it leads to blurry images.

So I take it that the camera’s capabilities are going to be a key feature you use in marketing?

Absolutely. Because when you talk to consumers, they say they’re taking blurry images with their phones all the time. Now you can hold the phone up in that concert and get a beautiful image, or of the kids at a soccer game. Now it goes further than that. This type of camera technology and the screen, they both take a lot of power, so we have a very large battery. But the other thing we have is wireless charging. You can set the phone down on a wireless charging platform, and it charges.

Is this Nokia-built charging technology, or did you license this from someone else?

We’re using a wireless charging technology standard called Qi (pronounced “chee”) in a lot of these technologies. We want to drive the standard. There’s also a very fashionable brand in Europe known as Fatboy; they make beanbag chairs, so now there’s a beanbag chair that charges your phone.

These phones are Windows Phone 8. Will we be seeing any Windows 7.8 devices?

We’re not announcing any today, but the statement we have made is that we will continue to sell devices with that software, and we’ll continue to upgrade them. For example, the start screen with the newly sized icons, those will start to show up on the existing Lumia devices as well. So some of those devices will continue to be sold. We may introduce some new ones, but we haven’t announced any yet.

It seems like the Windows phone market is growing for Nokia, but not fast enough to offset the declines in the Symbian and other lines. How do you plan to address that?

We don’t think about it as one offsets the other. We have to grow, and it is our intention with these devices to grow the number of Windows Phone devices that are out there, and to grow our market share as it relates to the smartphone segment. But at the same time, the other parts of our business, the mobile phone business in volume, it grew quarter on quarter. So there’s an opportunity to continue to grow a market that’s been very good to us.

Microsoft has Surface coming, which puts them in the hardware business. It has yet to say it is going to build its own phone, and Nokia hasn’t spoken of a tablet. But there’s a lot of potential for both of you there to make some moves. In that eventuality, what do you think of the prospect of competing with your most important partner?

It is the case that these relationships are complicated. Now, we haven’t announced a tablet, but if we were to do so, it would be competitive with whatever Microsoft does. That’s okay. I’ll use another example: Samsung. We compete directly with them on smartphones. They are, at the same time, one of our largest suppliers. And so you have different meetings with them at different times of the day. And that’s okay. These relationships are so complicated, you can be competing in one segment of the market and doing business with them in another. And that’s okay.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120905/eight-questions-for-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop/feed/0Netflix Heads to Scandinaviahttp://allthingsd.com/20120815/netflix-heads-to-scandanavia/
http://allthingsd.com/20120815/netflix-heads-to-scandanavia/#commentsWed, 15 Aug 2012 10:12:26 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=241523Here’s the next stop on Reed Hastings’s world tour: His video service plans to launch in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland by the end of the year.

The move is both expected and a sore spot with some Netflix investors. The company’s expansion outside the U.S. (starting with Canada, moving to Latin America and then the U.K.) has been an expensive one, with mixed results.

More than 3.6 million of the company’s 27 million streaming-video subscribers come from outside the U.S.

Canada has worked well for Hastings, but he admits that the company has stumbled in Latin America. In the U.K., Netflix says, it has acquired a million subscribers in its first six months of operation, putting it ahead of Amazon’s Lovefilm, which it will also compete with in some of its Scandinavian markets.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120815/netflix-heads-to-scandanavia/feed/0Nokia: "Made in Finland" No Longerhttp://allthingsd.com/20120730/nokia-made-in-finland-no-longer/
http://allthingsd.com/20120730/nokia-made-in-finland-no-longer/#commentsMon, 30 Jul 2012 12:00:47 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=235316Nokia has manufactured its last handset in Finland.

Come September, the struggling cellphone maker will shutter its Salo, Finland, handset factory as part of its global overhaul intended to save €1.6 billion by the end of 2013. Nokia’s Salo facility is the company’s last remaining manufacturing plant in its home country. It produced its final handset last Wednesday.

Sad news for Finland and the 780 Salo residents who are losing their jobs, but a necessary move for Nokia, which is in the midst of a difficult transition to a Windows-based smartphone business.

The company is shifting handset assembly to its factories in Asia, where the majority of its component suppliers are based. And by doing so, Nokia expects not only to cut costs, but to bolster its long-term competitive strength.

“Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market,” Niklas Savander, former EVP of Nokia’s Markets unit, said earlier this year. “By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive.”

The title is available now for iPhone, iPad and Android, and is coming soon to PCs, Macs and Windows Phones.

Amazing Alex has some 35 different interactive objects that game players can cause to bang into one another to create a single device to move among more than 100 levels. Fans can also create and upload their own level.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120709/start-up-to-revive-nokia-smartphone-software/feed/0Teardown Shows Nokia's Lumia 900 Costs $209 to Buildhttp://allthingsd.com/20120411/teardown-shows-nokias-lumia-900-costs-209-to-build/
http://allthingsd.com/20120411/teardown-shows-nokias-lumia-900-costs-209-to-build/#commentsWed, 11 Apr 2012 12:30:46 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=195170As smartphones go, the Lumia 900 has a lot of hopes tied up into it. It represents the collaboration of Microsoft, the software behemoth on the PC that has struggled in recent years to make a go of the smartphone business, and Nokia, once the king of wireless phones, period, now struggling to get back in the game versus Apple and Google.

Now the market research firm IHS iSuppli has taken a Lumia 900 apart and, in a report shared with AllThingsD that will be released later today, has determined that it costs Nokia about $209 to build. And, judging from the parts being used, it’s not exactly built like the most cutting-edge phone on the market.

In fact, it seems like Microsoft and wireless chipmaker Qualcomm are both making an effort to showcase how efficient Windows Phone 7 for mobile can be; at the same time, they seem to be aiming to entice other hardware manufacturers by demonstrating that a full-featured smartphone can be built using components that are about a generation behind the current high end, and therefore cheaper, says Andrew Rassweiler, the iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown.

For example, the teardown found that the Lumia 900 uses a single-core Qualcomm chip that costs $17 as its main applications processor; a phone with similar features running Google’s Android OS, such as Samsung’s Galaxy SII Skyrocket, uses a higher-end dual-core processor that costs $22.

“It appears what Microsoft and Qualcomm and Nokia are trying to do here — and this is being driven by Microsoft more than anyone else — is streamline the OS so it can run on a lighter processing platform,” Rassweiler told me. “The point being is to undercut the higher end phones.”

The choices don’t end with the processor. The phone contains only 512 megabytes of DRAM memory, where most phones would use one gigabyte. And the trend is expected to continue, as the next generation of Microsoft’s mobile OS will require even less memory.

Another example: The Bluetooth chip. Nokia is using a slightly older chip from Broadcom, and not the latest, greatest Bluetooth part. The difference between them is only $2.50, but it serves as another example showing that Nokia is aiming to compete on price.

For Nokia, the strategy seems to be one of aiming to compete against other phones on price, while offering similar features. The Lumia is thought to sell for $450 at retail without a subsidy, or about $200 lower than Apple’s iPhone 4S, which starts at $649 without a contract, depending on model, and costs between $188 and $245 to build.

Microsoft is also thought to be helping Nokia out, says iSuppli’s Wayne Lam, who also participated in the teardown analysis. While software costs are not considered in a teardown analysis, he says Microsoft is thought to be making less than $5 per phone in licensing fees on the Windows Phone 7 operating system, far lower than the $15 per device it is said to want. That would be in line with the $3 per phone price that Nokia is thought to have paid in licensing fees for the Symbian OS it used previously, and of which it was a partial owner. “Nokia is getting a fantastic discount,” Lam told me.

One place where Nokia didn’t skimp? The gyroscope chip, which determines how the phone is being moved. It contains the same gyroscope chip from STMicroelectronics that goes into the iPhone 4S. There are, apparently, some things on which you simply can’t compromise.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120411/teardown-shows-nokias-lumia-900-costs-209-to-build/feed/0My Kid Is an Honor Student at Windows Phone AppCampushttp://allthingsd.com/20120326/my-kid-is-an-honor-student-at-windows-phone-appcampus/
http://allthingsd.com/20120326/my-kid-is-an-honor-student-at-windows-phone-appcampus/#commentsMon, 26 Mar 2012 18:57:57 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=190111Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform has some slick hardware in Nokia’s new Lumia line, particularly the ridiculously low-priced 900. But its mobile application ecosystem continues to lag behind those of its rivals, so Microsoft is teaming up with Nokia to give it a boost.

On Monday, the two companies announced that they will together invest nearly $24 million in a new mobile app development program. Dubbed “AppCampus,” the effort will be held at Finland’s Aalto University over the next three years and, according to its proprietors will not only offer funding, but will also provide coaching in app design, usability and commercialization.

Best of all, participants will retain full intellectual property rights for whatever they create while attending.

An interesting initiative and one that demonstrates the urgency with which Microsoft and Nokia are approaching the deficits in the Windows Phone ecosystem. Currently, there are only about 70,000 applications in Microsoft’s Marketplace application store, with some glaring omissions, like Angry Birds Space and Instagram.

That’s a paucity compared to the more 550,000 Apple’s got in the App Store right now. But with this sort of commitment and some luck, Microsoft could begin to close the gap.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120326/my-kid-is-an-honor-student-at-windows-phone-appcampus/feed/0Nokia Completes Talks on Planned Job Cutshttp://allthingsd.com/20120322/nokia-completes-talks-on-planned-job-cuts/
http://allthingsd.com/20120322/nokia-completes-talks-on-planned-job-cuts/#commentsThu, 22 Mar 2012 16:49:34 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=189221Nokia Corp., the world’s largest handset maker by shipments, said Thursday it has completed negotiations with its labor unions over jobs cuts at its Salo plant in Finland.

The cuts are part of a plan announced last month to cut about 4,000 jobs at smartphone manufacturing plants at Salo, Reynosa in Mexico and Komarom in Hungary, in a push to move device assembly closer to components suppliers in Asia.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120322/nokia-completes-talks-on-planned-job-cuts/feed/0I Went to Espoo, Finland, and All I Got Was This Angry Birds T-Shirt (And Plush Toy, And …)http://allthingsd.com/20120308/i-went-to-espoo-finland-and-all-i-got-was-this-angry-birds-t-shirt-and-plush-toy-and/
http://allthingsd.com/20120308/i-went-to-espoo-finland-and-all-i-got-was-this-angry-birds-t-shirt-and-plush-toy-and/#commentsFri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:13 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=176394There’s no mistaking what pays the bills at Rovio.

The company’s offices, in the Helsinki suburb of Espoo, are filled with Angry Birds memorabilia. There are stuffed birds and pigs everywhere, and each of the company’s conference rooms is named for one of its hallmark characters.

“It sets the right tone,” CEO Mikael Hed said in an interview at the offices last month, an Angry Birds T-shirt peeking out from underneath his gray sweatshirt. “It shows what we are really about.”

Hed’s office has stuffed birds and pigs, along with several Dilbert figurines and other toys. The only anachronism is a business book, which Hed says was sent to him and he has yet to crack open.

“I went to business school,” Hed said. “I used to read these kind of things.”

These days, he’s more interested in seeing what his two young children think of the latest game or Angry Birds toy than he is in hearing an academic toss around business theory.

That focus on fun and simplicity pervades Rovio’s main offices, which look as much like a playroom as a business center. Stuffed Angry Birds are practically as common as monitors or staplers.

The company’s offices, overlooking the Baltic Sea, are just a slingshot away from Finland’s best-known tech company, Nokia. Rovio began life in Helsinki as a small, struggling game maker. It moved to nearby Espoo in August 2010 after its Angry Birds game started to take off.

The company initially occupied an office designed for 50, and expanded to the building next door once its ranks swelled to 70. It now occupies four floors there, along with the original spot.

Its main business is on the sixth floor, with sales, marketing, and finance staff, along with a concept retail store featuring a slingshot chair and all manner of Angry Birds gear. A theater is home to regular employee movie days, while other employee groups meet to play board games or barbecue outside (yes, even in the snow).

The company’s game designers and animators work on other floors, hidden away from outside visitors. The second floor, with the animation team, has a more relaxed, artistic style, with unfinished wooden furniture and vintage pieces. It also has a “no outdoor shoes” policy, so people leave their shoes at the door, putting on slippers or other indoor shoes.

The third and fourth floors, home to the game teams, are more similar in style to the business floor, but without nearly as many plush toys.

Brand head Ville Heijari works near the 10-person marketing team, but he admits he occasionally goes downstairs to the other floors to get help on an Angry Birds level he is stuck on.

One has to wonder, though: Don’t they ever get tired of birds and pigs?

“So far, never,” Heijari said. That’s true of both the games and the products, he insists. “Even some of the small things that we do — completely random things — I think they are delightful.”

Of course, with essentially just one product — however big it has become — the more critical question is whether the broader public will keep feeling the same.

http://allthingsd.com/20120308/i-went-to-espoo-finland-and-all-i-got-was-this-angry-birds-t-shirt-and-plush-toy-and/feed/0Tablets That Have a Certain Feel to Themhttp://allthingsd.com/20120301/tablets-that-have-a-certain-feel-to-them/
http://allthingsd.com/20120301/tablets-that-have-a-certain-feel-to-them/#commentsThu, 01 Mar 2012 18:13:48 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=179612Given that most Android tablets look the same, a couple of companies are showing technologies in Barcelona that make sure they don’t feel the same.

One of those companies is a Finnish start-up called Senseg. Its technology, which it says is just now ready to go into products, lets you rub your hand over a flat glass tablet screen and feel texture that is eerily like a real world object. Touch a picture of kitchen tiles, for example and it feels smooth until the bump where the grout is.

A different approach is offered up by Immersion, a longtime player in this field, which is showing off a new generation of electronics that open the door to far more realistic sensations than the current vibrations or simple touch feedback from a virtual keyboard.

Haptics — or the technology that enables adding a sense of feel to electronics — has been around for a while. Immersion, for example, demoed how a phone or tablet could gain a better sense of feel back at our D7 conference in 2009.

Early devices just rumbled or vibrated at certain times. Touch feedback has already made its way in more limited uses, with the most common being virtual keyboards that offer a physical sensation when a key is pressed.

But the field has continued to evolve. Some of the technology just on the horizon reproduces the way things feel much more authentically.

At its booth this year, Immersion was showing a phone with digital maracas that feel like you’re actually rattling rice. Then there’s the roller coaster video that gives you both the click-click-click as you climb and the “whoosh” as the descent begins. Yet another demo app adds to any music playback a bass track you can feel.

Both Immersion and Senseg also demonstrated haptics used another way — as a physical cue to something in a long list of data. Imagine, for example, scrolling though email and feeling a physical bump when you get to a message from your spouse or boss.

Similarly, varying amounts of touch feedback can be used to indicate the popularity or rank of something. Immersion had a demo app, for example, where users could flip through a set of images and feel increased touch sensation when they scrolled to a photo with lots of comments.

The technologies from Immersion and Senseg have some similarities, but work in different ways. Immersion’s technology uses a rectangular bar-like component called a piezo module, that physically vibrates the device in varying locations and frequencies. Senseg, meanwhile, uses the combination of a custom chip and a special screen coating to create an electric field on the front of the display.

Senseg’s approach requires developers to explicitly write their software to use the technology, meaning it could be most attractive to device makers that want to add a feel to their user interface skin. Immersion, meanwhile, has programming interfaces that developers can use, but also has a mechanism to add haptic feedback even to apps that were not designed for it.

The two technologies are also at different stages. Senseg is just now looking to sign its first customers, while Immersion says its newer technology is already in a tablet from Pantech and will come soon to other tablets. Phones should also get the new touch tech, once the piezo modules are reduced a bit in size.

As hard as Nokia has been working to improve upon Windows Phone, it has been working perhaps even harder to find ways to bring the phone further downmarket.

That’s because it badly needs models that can fill the spots occupied by its waning Symbian platform to sell in strongholds like China and Indonesia.

With the Lumia 610, introduced on Monday, Nokia is not only hitting the lowest price for a Windows Phone but also going into new languages.

“The expansion of the portfolio downwards in price points is obviously quite important,” Nokia VP Ilari Nurmi said in an interview last week at Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland.

The 610 is made possible in part by a new version of Windows Phone that has lower memory requirements, but also through lower-cost display and processor technology.

As a result, Nokia says it can sell the Lumia 610 for 189 euros unsubsidized ($252), roughly $100 less than it charges for the Lumia 710, and less than half the price of the Lumia 800.

Despite the cost-cutting moves, Nurmi insists that the core of the Windows Phone experience is preserved, something he said is not always the case with low-end Android phones.

It is true that its lower amount of memory means that not all Windows Phone apps will run, but Nurmi insisted that “a supermajority” of programs will run.

Nokia is also announcing global availability for the Lumia 900, announced for the U.S. with AT&T at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The global version of the device, however, will feature an HSPA+ modem, as opposed to the LTE one being used for the U.S.

http://allthingsd.com/20120227/with-lumia-610-nokia-aims-to-take-windows-phone-to-a-new-low-price/feed/0Nokia's Challenges: One Cabbie's Perspectivehttp://allthingsd.com/20120224/nokias-challenges-one-cabbies-perspective/
http://allthingsd.com/20120224/nokias-challenges-one-cabbies-perspective/#commentsFri, 24 Feb 2012 19:30:14 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=177664Mika Saaristo has been driving cabs in Helsinki for 25 years, and he has been a solid Nokia customer for almost as long.

Recently, though, he bought a pair of Samsung Galaxy devices.

“All my friends, they wanted to have the iPhone,” Saaristo said. Not one to follow the crowd but still wanting a powerful smartphone, Saaristo bought a Samsung Galaxy S II, as well as a Galaxy Mini to use with his second SIM card.

In perhaps an even more troubling indicator, Saaristo has seen a marked decline in the number of trips he makes to drive partners to Nokia’s offices. It used to be at least once a week that he was taking a foreigner to one of Nokia’s offices in Espoo, Finland, or in the Helsinki area.

Now, he said, it is more like once a month.

“Maybe not even that much,” he said, as we drove from central Helsinki to the airport.

Saaristo is hopeful that the company’s bet on Windows Phone will pay off, but notes that it is more a matter of pride than economic necessity, observing that Finland’s once Nokia-dependent economy has diversified significantly.

(Note: While my time in Finland is at an end, I still have a bunch more stories to tell about Rovio, Nokia, the Finnish start-up scene and my first experience ice fishing. I’ll tell as many as I can before Mobile World Congress, though some may have to wait until after Barcelona.)